Twitter and Your Ministry

In our last blog entry, we wrote the 5 Reasons Your Ministry Should Be on Twitter. If you've determined that you want to join the rapidly growing micro-blogging and social networking website, you'll want to develop a strategy, create your account, and embed your tweets on your ministry website.

Develop Your Twitter Strategy

Before you start posting tweets, you need to determine what you will post. Your ultimate goals for Twitter should be

Embedding links to your website and getting people to click them

Adding followers

So you'll need to develop a strategy for accomplishing these goals. Here is what your weekly strategy might look like:

Monday: tweet a link to your latest sermon podcast

Wednesday: tweet a preview and link to your blog post or a Bible verse of the week

Thursday or Friday: retweet from your favorite pastor, thinker, or follower; tweet about an upcoming event or news item and link to your website

Saturday: tweet an invitation to join your Sunday services and provide your sermon series title

You may not feel the need to tweet this often, but this gives you an idea of how a strategy built upon the days of the week can remove the "What to tweet" guessing game.

Tips for tweeting:

Links, links, links: the most important part of any tweet is a link to other content--news, events, blogs, sermons, pictures--and the text of the tweet should "sell" this content

Retweeting is a great way for other Twitter users to notice you and possibly convert into followers. People love it when you repeat what they have to say. Having your posts retweeted by others means you've succeeded.

Word count: Each tweet is limited to 140 characters, so each word is important. Don't waste them.

URL Compression: URLs can be long and nasty. Use Tiny URL to compress them to only a few characters. Just paste in your long one, and it'll make it shorter.

Create Your Twitter Account

Creating your account on Twitter is as simple as coming up with a username (one that's easy to remember and makes sense for your ministry) and adding some followers.

Go to Twitter.com and click on the Let me in button.

Fill in your account information, including your username. Create.

Click through the three steps to add people to follow.

After your account is created, edit your picture and profile by clicking Profile on the home page.

Click Design and edit your background. You can even upload a custom background.

Now you're ready to post your first tweet.

Add Your Twitter Feed to Your iMinistries Website

A good way to let your website visitors know they can follow you on Twitter is to embed your feed on your ministry website. This is also an effective way to build in advertisement for content on your website into your homepage. How to embed your feed as an ad on your website.

Free Trial

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